[Discussion] On "Forgotten Americans"

I recently had a discussion with a friend of mine regarding Hillbilly Elegy and other books of despair for rural, white America and it occurred to me that though the economic hollowing out of rural communities may be the result of changing economic paradigms, the relief they are demanding doesn't appear to be positively affected by any of the "solutions" forwarded by either political side. You are not going to "invest" your way to an economically vibrant Appalachia. You are not going to suddenly turn coal country into the next Silicon Holler. And NOTHING is going to bring coal jobs back.

I suggested to my friend that the only thing that was going to "save" Appalachia was straight talk and bus tickets. Communities die. There are hundreds of abandoned towns in the Missouri Territory that were once thriving towns fueling the Western expansion. The hollers of Harlan County are not immune to the same influences irrespective of their history.

Anyone who wants a ticket out should be given the assistance to do so. The experiment of propping up the "heartland" has failed and will only fail more as automation destroys trucking.

I love how we can still call populations that have had barrels of newspaper ink spilled over them and NYT's best sellers written about them "forgotten."

I also love how books like Hillbilly Elegy overlook the fact that there are more than white people living in Appalachia. In Southern Appalachia--covering the northern parts of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia--at least one out of every four of the region's eight million residents are non-Hispanic blacks.

I grew up in Ohio during the 80s. I remember a great deal media coverage about the decline of manufacturing throughout the Great Lakes/Midwest region. It even got a snappy name: Rust Belt.

Decades later there are still areas that are suffering from the hangover of losing those well-paying jobs. But there are entire new industries that have been developed (and old ones, like automotive manufacturing, have migrated from Detroit to the I-75 and I-65 corridors). Some of them don't guarantee a middle class lifestyle like their grandfathers had, but no one's able to withstand global economics.

Appalachia is losing (has been losing) their version of manufacturing plants. And it will take decades to sort out. Like the Rust Belt in the 80s people will eventually move to where the jobs are (mobility in Appalachia is a bit lower than the national average, though the most recent data is clouded by the Great Recession).

I agree with you that you aren't going to turn coal country into Silicon Holler. The infrastructure just isn't there. Historically technology centers develop around areas with lots of high quality higher education and that simply doesn't exist in most of Appalachia. Also the area struggles with the basics of high tech infrastructure: broadband. Few colleges and universities and slow internet doesn't bode well for Silicon Holler.

But there are industries that could pick up the slack. Tourism has become a staple for many communities. Others are finding that people from outside the region are moving there to retire, opening the way for a host of related services.

Areas like Central Appalachia could benefit from more of what they're already doing under the table: growing weed. Legalization could be a boon for what is the most economically distressed part of Appalachia.

But against all of that you have human stubbornness and pride. People don't want to move away from their friends, families, and social support networks. People don't want to take jobs they consider beneath them in pay, prestige, or both.

As much as people talk about economic solutions for the region, it kinda boils down to the fact that the culture has to change. You can't promote contempt for (or merely indifference to) education when every study done shows that the region's lower educational attainment has directly and negatively impacted its economic development. You can't simultaneously promote fear and jealousy of cities--fear of their diversity and their power to erode accepted rural cultural mores and jealousy of their prosperity--when they currently offer the greatest hope for young Appalachians. And you can't claim that you value your individuality and independence over all while expecting the state and federal government to bail you and your community out.

I was wondering what I wanted to say about this topic but this kind of sums it up.

OG_slinger wrote:

As much as people talk about economic solutions for the region, it kinda boils down to the fact that the culture has to change. You can't promote contempt for (or merely indifference to) education when every study done shows that the region's lower educational attainment has directly and negatively impacted its economic development. You can't simultaneously promote fear and jealousy of cities--fear of their diversity and their power to erode accepted rural cultural mores and jealousy of their prosperity--when they currently offer the greatest hope for young Appalachians. And you can't claim that you value your individuality and independence over all while expecting the state and federal government to bail you and your community out.

OG_slinger wrote:

As much as people talk about economic solutions for the region, it kinda boils down to the fact that the culture has to change. You can't promote contempt for (or merely indifference to) education when every study done shows that the region's lower educational attainment has directly and negatively impacted its economic development. You can't simultaneously promote fear and jealousy of cities--fear of their diversity and their power to erode accepted rural cultural mores and jealousy of their prosperity--when they currently offer the greatest hope for young Appalachians. And you can't claim that you value your individuality and independence over all while expecting the state and federal government to bail you and your community out.

Yup. The best thing we can do for young, ambitious Appalachians is give them a bus ticket.

I think we need to figure out a government-sponsored job re-training system. I'm obviously not smart enough to figure out how to do it. But someone needs to analyze the job market trends and provide low-cost re-training options for mid-life people who find their industries dying.

The real issue is the 50+ year olds who are getting close to retirement age, but their career is dying before they can retire. Re-training them is hard, finding new jobs that pay decently is hard. Housing and medical expenses aren't getting cheaper.

We need to address the "15 or more jobs before you retire" problem, the "what will you live on after you retire" problem, and the "CEOs making 1000x their bottom workers" problem in order to reduce the economic anxiety and racism of the rural populations.

I don't think you are wrong but those things are not things we are good at as a species historically.

It would be wonderful if somehow the "American Exceptionalism" helped us figure this out but I find it is usually a code phrase for not doing much of anything because whatever we are doing is perfect by simple virtue of being done buy US.

I think tied to this is also government outreach and programs to help all poor people - including Appalachian folks- build life skills and get proper mental health treatment. A big part of Hillbilly Eulogy focuses on the effects of multi-generational poverty, poor coping skills and substance abuse. That imho has to be part of the picture. (And I’m only one generation removed from dirt poor Kentucky farmers with a lot of those problems).

jdzappa wrote:

I think tied to this is also government outreach and programs to help all poor people - including Appalachian folks- build life skills and get proper mental health treatment. A big part of Hillbilly Eulogy focuses on the effects of multi-generational poverty, poor coping skills and substance abuse. That imho has to be part of the picture. (And I’m only one generation removed from dirt poor Kentucky farmers with a lot of those problems).

Study after study from the developing world point to the same conclusion that the escape from the cycle of poverty is to MOVE OUT OF POVERTY. If you live in the famine prone sticks, you will not climb the generational ladder to the Third World middle class until you move to the city and take a job as a rickshaw driver or fruit vendor. Keep doing what you're doing and you'll keep getting what you're getting.

We can teach rural Appalachians money skills all we like, but until they move out of the NO JOB ZONE, it's all just theory.

cheeze_pavilion wrote:

Just a bit of history: migration is not unknown to the Appalachian peoples.

It's not unknown to pretty much every peoples in recent history.

Poor rural folk everywhere have moved to the cities because cities have more, higher paying jobs. Heck, 200 million rural Chinese have migrated to cities over the last couple of decades.

Mixolyde wrote:

I think we need to figure out a government-sponsored job re-training system. I'm obviously not smart enough to figure out how to do it. But someone needs to analyze the job market trends and provide low-cost re-training options for mid-life people who find their industries dying.

The real issue is the 50+ year olds who are getting close to retirement age, but their career is dying before they can retire. Re-training them is hard, finding new jobs that pay decently is hard. Housing and medical expenses aren't getting cheaper.

We need to address the "15 or more jobs before you retire" problem, the "what will you live on after you retire" problem, and the "CEOs making 1000x their bottom workers" problem in order to reduce the economic anxiety and racism of the rural populations.

The problem is that even if you could figure out a job retraining system for, say the 50-year-old Appalachian coal miner with barely a high school education, there's not going to be a job waiting for them in their town (or nearby) that pays $60,000 a year. Nothing the government can do is going to change that reality.

The only solution is to move to where better paying (though not $60K) jobs are or stay and take a local job that is going to pay a little over minimum wage.

OG_slinger wrote:

The problem is that even if you could figure out a job retraining system for, say the 50-year-old Appalachian coal miner with barely a high school education, there's not going to be a job waiting for them in their town (or nearby) that pays $60,000 a year. Nothing the government can do is going to change that reality.

There are certainly levers available to the government to encourage businesses to invest in depressed regions, from tax incentives to low-cost financing.

Whether it's an efficient use of those resources, I'm not smart enough to know.

Jonman wrote:

There are certainly levers available to the government to encourage businesses to invest in depressed regions, from tax incentives to low-cost financing.

Whether it's an efficient use of those resources, I'm not smart enough to know.

I should clarify my statement: there's nothing the government can do to change that reality fast enough to help that 50 year-old who wants a high-paying replacement job *now*.

Over time, maybe. But even with tax incentives those companies still have to decide if they want to open up operations in an area with underdeveloped infrastructure and a workforce that is less educated than pretty much everywhere else. And to overcome those issues the government would have to invest even more and those investments--especially education--would take decades to pay off.

I am reminded of gigantic, pristine ghost cities in the Chinese hinterland where the government tried to relocate people because land was too expensive and infrastructure was overtaxed.

People abandoned these places because they went to where the jobs are.

Build shining cities on Appalachian outhouses all you like. They’ll not bring prosperity. They’re just Potemkin villages.

jdzappa wrote:

I think tied to this is also government outreach and programs to help all poor people - including Appalachian folks- build life skills and get proper mental health treatment. A big part of Hillbilly Eulogy focuses on the effects of multi-generational poverty, poor coping skills and substance abuse. That imho has to be part of the picture. (And I’m only one generation removed from dirt poor Kentucky farmers with a lot of those problems).

This is really the heart of it. I'm also only one generation removed from dirt poor farming. My mom and dad didn't make it. They just didn't. They did their best, but my dad went blind when I was a kid and my mom spent the rest of her short life trying to keep the family afloat and then care for my dad.

I invited my two brothers move to Portland with my wife and I. They moved up with us. They eventually got their feet under them in the wider world and they believe their lives are better for it. They did the thing many of you are talking about and just moved from the dying community.

I tried for decades to get my parents to move up here with us. I offered to physically move them and pay the costs. They never made it.

They had too much baggage. Too many pills. I would have literally had to take control over their lives, they were that broken. Once my mom died we just moved my dad up with us, lock stock and barrel.

We escaped to a blue state because of force of will on my wife and I's part. But not everyone has that luxury. For those that don't we should be parachuting mental health professionals into red states and making sure they have access to quality doctors and not just prescriptions. They should have time off of work to take care of themselves. They should have f*cking guaranteed vacation.

Ultimately, though, they need to move where the jobs and services are.

Like I said, we need to offer relocation assistance to anyone who wants to get the hell out of places like that to places where they need workers. Whether that be a bus ticket, a place to stay, and a limited public stipend while they get their feet under them, it is all worth it in the end.

Paleocon wrote:

Like I said, we need to offer relocation assistance to anyone who wants to get the hell out of places like that to places where they need workers. Whether that be a bus ticket, a place to stay, and a limited public stipend while they get their feet under them, it is all worth it in the end.

Do you want an urban homelessness crisis? Because this is how you get an urban homelessness crisis.

Jonman wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

Like I said, we need to offer relocation assistance to anyone who wants to get the hell out of places like that to places where they need workers. Whether that be a bus ticket, a place to stay, and a limited public stipend while they get their feet under them, it is all worth it in the end.

Do you want an urban homelessness crisis? Because this is how you get an urban homelessness crisis.

There would certainly be a period of adjustment as infrastructure would have to be adjusted, but that externality is tiny when compared to the issues we already face because labor is not as fluid or fungible as capital. If the "forgotten Americans" want relief, they need to go to where the jobs are. If we want to help them, we need to help them do that. Giving them job training in the BFE or in some burnt out coal town is not helping them.

One point about Hillbilly Elegy: it's been seriously ticking off historians of Appalachia and people who are actually from there: J.D. Vance, the False Prophet of Blue America

In many ways, I should appreciate Elegy. I grew up poor on the border of southwest Virginia and east Tennessee. My parents are the sort of god-fearing hard workers that conservatives like Vance fetishize. I attended an out-of-state Christian college thanks to scholarships, and had to raise money to even buy a plane ticket to attend grad school. My rare genetic disease didn’t get diagnosed until I was 21 because I lacked consistent access to health care. I’m one of the few members of my high school class who earned a bachelor’s degree, one of the fewer still who earned a master’s degree, and one of maybe three or four who left the area for good.

But unlike Vance, I look at my home and see a region abandoned by the government elected to serve it. My public high school didn’t have enough textbooks and half our science lab equipment didn’t work. Some of my classmates did not have enough to eat; others wore the same clothes every day. Sometimes this happened because their addict parents spent money on drugs. But the state was no help here either. Its solution to our opioid epidemic has been incarceration, not rehabilitation. Addicts with additional psychiatric conditions are particularly vulnerable. There aren’t enough beds in psychiatric hospitals to serve the region—the same reason Virginia State Sen. Creigh Deeds (D) nearly died at the hands of his mentally ill son in 2013.

And then there is welfare. In Elegy, Vance complains about hillbillies who he believes purchased cellphones with welfare funds. But data makes it clear that our current welfare system is too limited to lift depressed regions out of poverty.

For the good of the poor and common people: What Hillbilly Elegy gets wrong about Appalachia and the working class

From local papers to the national press, from Fox News to NPR, from the lecterns of state schools and business schools, Vance has served up “straight talk” about the white working class that both conservatives and liberals are eager to consume. For conservatives, Vance’s rags-to-riches story – from his broken childhood in rural Ohio and Kentucky to the heights of Silicon Valley’s venture capital world – is confirmation that the American Dream they’re selling works: that through hard work and bootstrapping all is possible, handouts be damned. At the same time, liberals applaud Vance for demonstrating the dangers inherent in what he characterizes a veil of misunderstanding between coastal elites and rural whites. The problem, as Sarah Jones writes, is that the “media class fixated on the spectacle of white trash Appalachia, with Vance as its representative-and-exile” and stopped looking for any other voices or perspectives. If your goal is to rebuild coalitions of working class whites and win back their votes – and this is the angle that Jones covers – it might be time to consult a new expert, or perhaps just actual working class people. I’ll leave that angle to others, but keep reading, because I have a good recommended text.

The spin that Vance is called upon most often to provide is that which absolves working class whites at large of their racial animus, and he is happy to oblige and draw thin lines of distinction between, for example, individuals who are “actively racist” and those who just don’t believe in “modern notions of equality.” This is an odd position to stake out, as Vance is in the business of holding poor whites accountable for every other social ill that holds them back, from their under-employment to the corporate deception that landed them with inflated mortgages. “People talk about hard work all the times in places like Middletown,” he writes in Elegy, “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of young men work fewer than twenty hours in a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.” As Jones points out, his complaints about poor white families that use government assistance to purchase big televisions or iPhones are little more than “a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class.” For those wanting deeper look at problems implicit in that outlook and what it borrows from long-debunked stereotypes of Black families, Bill Turner has some information for you.

Like Jones, people often mistake me for someone who could read such observations and nod along. I’m a white woman from Appalachia who, despite my working class background and own history of holding blue collar jobs, achieved some markers of an ‘elite’ status by earning a PhD and finding a more gentle form of economic exploitation in the academy. People mistake me for someone who should be grateful that a person like J.D. Vance is helping focus the country on the problems faced by Appalachians, who, incidentally, are not all white. People make these assumptions for the same reasons that J.D. Vance does, because they find it difficult to believe that other Appalachians have produced any equally meaningful scholarship, policy, or criticism of their own about the region, and that this work might tell a different story about economic decline and the forces behind it.

There is no neutral there: Appalachia as a mythic “Trump Country”

When the levee breaks, mama, you've got to move.

OG_slinger wrote:
cheeze_pavilion wrote:

Just a bit of history: migration is not unknown to the Appalachian peoples.

It's not unknown to pretty much every peoples in recent history.

There's also a good case to be made that the Scots Irish arrived to North America as economic and military refugees. I have a branch of family that came in that way and moved into the hills, but they kept moving further out (either to find money or to escape church and legal problems) until they found themselves in the Gulf. Plenty of folks have moved out of those areas over the centuries—those who stayed behind are part of a couple-hundred-year social legacy of staying when there was good reason not to.

That said, three important points:

1) There have been multiple points in time when Appalachia was a profitable place to live.

2) There are folks doing good, hard work in these communities and regional cities to build better government accountability and stronger communities, and that effort and those people should be supported by those of us with the luxury of living elsewhere.

3) Leaving isn't always a choice. Uprooting is a costly, socially violent, risky process. Part of that can be mitigated by looking at the transit (bus pass, as mentioned by Paleo) and destination environment (as Jonman implies), but if you've got a sick dependant, a chronic condition of your own, a spouse who refuses to move, etc., getting out can be especially tough.

And for what it's worth, all three of those also apply to under-resourced areas of major northern cities like mine.

Look at the top ten or so job areas from 2017 (growth estimated to 2024).

Home Health Care, Medical Assistants and Nursing - Requires good secondary education and relocation.

Systems Analysts and Software Developers - Requires good primary and secondary education, as well as broadband and power infrastructure. May require relocation is broadband and work from home is not available.

Marketing - Good primary, secondary education, and relocation.

Restaurant Cooks and Servers - Can really be done anywhere, but not in quantity.

Electricians and Construction Workers - Requires good primary education, strong apprentice or secondary education, and likely relocation.

So the ubiquitous jobs that are growing are the lowest-paying ones. The better-paying ones require good social infrastructure, government investment (since we've removed the idea that corporations should benefit their worker's communities), and the ability to leave family and friends and beautiful terrain behind.

What I see here is that Republicans have cut the legs out from underneath the very support structures that are needed to get people through this (as OG pointed out). It will be interesting to see how this affects them in the next decade as automation reaches more and more industries.

I'm betting that's the *other* demographic that will screw them to the wall. And they won't see it coming because they are ideologically blinded to the solutions.

Uprooting and moving to the city is theoretically the right idea, but is made much harder when a lot of cities have a serious lack of affordable housing options, and a serious lack of public transit options. So the poor are forced to live further out, own a car, and deal with a longer commute to whatever job they can find.

This also isn't a problem limited to Appalachia. My mother moved back to upstate NY after divorcing my father and selling the house, because it's where she wanted to live. Now, she's dirt poor with a worthless house. She's got a bachelor's, but there's no work up there for a 60 year old woman who was a stay at home mom for most of her life. Leaving isn't an option because she can't afford to, doesn't want to, and the job market won't be any better for her anywhere. She's likely going to spend the rest of her life poor and stuck where she is.

Somebody with more knowledges in their brain-bucket, tell me: is it true there were parts of Appalachia (I want to say, especially western West Virginia) where Native Americans never lived?

I've mentioned it before in another thread, and admittedly had just read Cryptonomicon, but why hasn't someone tried building naturally-cooled and hardened data centers into old mines? Then train the miners to do the IT work required to keep them running. Hire consultants/contractors to get it off the ground and train them, then let them take over when the contracts are up.

H.P. Lovesauce wrote:

Somebody with more knowledges in their brain-bucket, tell me: is it true there were parts of Appalachia (I want to say, especially western West Virginia) where Native Americans never lived?

I highly doubt it. People lived all over North America, sometimes in fairly inhospitable places. Including West Virginia.

IMAGE(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Fort_Ancient_Monongahela_cultures_HRoe_2010.jpg)
Western West Virginia, in particular, had the Fort Ancient culture (1000-1750), the same group who are famous for the Serpent Mound in Ohio. The Fort Anchient culture are believed the be descended from the Ohio Hopewell culture, who flourished in the Middle Woodland period:
IMAGE(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Hopewell_Exchange_Network_HRoe_2010.jpg)

Later on, closer to European contact, there were also Moneton, Shatteras, and Mohetan settlements in western West Virginia, with reports of Ouabano, Tomahitton, and Conestoga/Susquehannocks groups nearby. And I'm sure I've left quite a lot out.

Here's an overview of archaeological Native American sites in West Virginia. It's recently been discovered through skeletal remains that the earliest incursion into Alaska was at least 25,000 years ago. The distance between NW Alaska and Miami is less than 5000 miles. Assume that cultures were capable of moving one mile per year... What's the likelihood that any part of North America has not felt human feet before the Europeans came?

There's some recent evidence that the Great Serpent Mound dates to the earlier Adena culture, who also lived in western West Virginia. And before them were many other cultures.

Robear wrote:

Here's an overview of archaeological Native American sites in West Virginia. It's recently been discovered through skeletal remains that the earliest incursion into Alaska was at least 25,000 years ago. The distance between NW Alaska and Miami is less than 5000 miles. Assume that cultures were capable of moving one mile per year... What's the likelihood that any part of North America has not felt human feet before the Europeans came?

:-)

Paleo Indian artifacts have been found in Mason, Wood and Hampshire Counties in West Virginia, so we have direct evidence that they walked that far relatively quickly.

Bonus_Eruptus wrote:

I've mentioned it before in another thread, and admittedly had just read Cryptonomicon, but why hasn't someone tried building naturally-cooled and hardened data centers into old mines? Then train the miners to do the IT work required to keep them running. Hire consultants/contractors to get it off the ground and train them, then let them take over when the contracts are up.

Probably because someone would have to build a boatload of high speed internet and electrical infrastructure that doesn't exist.

There was a fairly recent article about Pikeville, KY, a small town that wanted to make Silicon Holler happen. The problem was that they don't have broadband internet, which makes building a tech hub much more difficult. Getting the city connected to the fiber optic backbone would cost $15 million that neither it nor the state had.

Wasn't there an article about how government subsidized retraining programs were offered, and way fewer people signed up than expected? Partly because many were holding out for coal jobs to come back?

Chaz wrote:

Wasn't there an article about how government subsidized retraining programs were offered, and way fewer people signed up than expected? Partly because many were holding out for coal jobs to come back?

Worse. Fewer people signed up and those that did chose to get trained in coal mining.

This is a sad story. Doubly so how Trump has so far been towards any sort of “regulation”

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018...

The entire coal industry employs fewer than 80,000 people. That's just over half the number of people who work in car washes in the US...

I get that coal was once the backbone of our domestic energy strategy, but today it's just a remnant. Unfortunately, the demographics of coal miners make them entirely sympathetic to the Trumpeters, and the bizarro world economics that are still popular among those who came up in factories in the 50's sell the lie that coal is another important leg on which any economy can stand. It's a terrible thing to do to people.